A Minigame Game that combines some elements of real-time strategy with real-time combat. Released in 1984 for Atari 8-Bit Computers by Atari's Advanced Games Group during the time of The Great Video Game Crash of 1983, it was a commercial flop.
At some point in the future, the Earth's few remaining cities are under attack by powerful missiles from a hostile nation. One battleship or submarine (the game is ambiguous on that point), the Legacy, is set to stop them. Yup, it's set in the Cold War.
The gameplay involves a combination of moving freely around a map and activating multiple attack modes at will, each one being their own minigame:
Torpedo: Fire torpedoes at ships while dodging their missiles in a form of early pseudo-3D.
Sea-to-Land: Attack missile bases before their missiles have a chance to reach the cities you're defending.
Sea-to-Air: Shoot missiles out of the sky before they reach the cities.
While playing one of these minigames, other things can happen in real-time, such as being attacked by another ship or having the enemy launch its missiles. The game ends with either the player's death, the destruction of all cities, or the player winning by destroying all missile launchers.
This game provides examples of:
- Anti-Air: Your ship/submarine has the ability to shoot missiles out of the sky.
- Anti Idling: Missiles are fired from time to time, and enemy ships are moving around the map, no matter what you're doing. If you idle, either you or your cities are gonna get attacked.
- Atomic Hate: The game is all about destroying missiles powerful enough to destroy entire cities, and destroying their launchers.
- Collision Damage: A justified example. If your ship bumps into the enemy ship, the enemy dies, and you take damage. However, if this happens with an intelligence ship, you don't reveal the invisible missile launchers.
- Destructible Projectiles: Shooting missiles out of the sky to protect the cities.
- Difficulty Levels: Six of them, ranging from very easy to brutally difficult.
- Emergency Refuelling: Your vehicle has a fuel limit. On lower difficulties, this isn't an issue, but on higher difficulties, you'll need to return to the cities you're protecting to refuel.
- Enemy-Detecting Radar: The map shows the position of many ships (more keep spawning in over time), and most missile launchers. Why not all missile launchers? Certain ones only show up if intelligence ships are destroyed.
- Faux First Person 3D: The perspective from the ship/submarine in the ship combat mode uses various effects to fake a 3D look, such as layered lines representing moving through water.
- Hell Is That Noise: There's a very distinct sound that plays every time the enemy fires missiles, which you might hear when you're busy fighting a battleship. Stop those missiles!
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The difficulty levels are all named after different military ranks. Unless you're playing the non-American version, in which case they're just numbers.
- Instant-Win Condition: Your job is to destroy the enemy's missile launchers, no matter how many ships are in the ocean. They win by either killing the player or destroying all the cities the player must protect.
- Keystone Army: While the enemy has endless ships in the ocean that all attack the player, destroying their missile launchers is what it takes to destroy them no matter how many ships there are. The missile launchers can't even fight back, and need to rely on the ships to defend them.
- Minigame Game: The game is about swapping between these three specific minigames in real-time, all connected to a main meta-game.
- Motion Parallax: Employed along with other tricks to create a pseudo-3D look to the ship combat segments. The clouds, and birds flying over the ocean, are on two separate layers based on distance.
- Protection Mission: You have to defend the only remaining allied cities in existence. If they're destroyed, you lose.
- Ramming Always Works: Partial aversion. Intelligence ships, which must be destroyed in order to reveal otherwise invisible missile launchers, won't reveal them if destroyed by ramming but only if destroyed by shooting. All other ships can be destroyed by ramming with the only penalty being damage to the player.
- See the Invisible: On any difficulty level higher than the lowest, some missile launchers can only be seen once they're revealed by destroying intelligence ships. These missile launchers can still fire missiles when not visible, but can only be attacked when they're revealed.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: It's possible to attack your own cities and destroy them. This is done by entering land combat mode on your own cities, which is done to refuel, and then attacking them instead of backing out. The developers probably should have come up with a different way to refuel so attacking your own cities by accident wouldn't be possible.
